Watching the Detectives

True Detective Is the First Cop Show to Embrace the Digital Age

In 1928, the detective novelist, S.S. Van Dine published “Twenty rules for writing detective stories” in The American magazine. The First Commandment reads

The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving
the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

Detective fiction invites readers to work alongside or, if you’re really good, ahead of the detective to solve the crime. If the author does not play fair, the reader cannot play the game. The challenge for the writer is to provide clues tantalizing enough to sustain readers’ desires for answers, but challenging enough to foil their efforts to find them.

On this count, Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Joji Fukunaga, the creator and director of HBO’s True Detective, have succeeded marvelously. The show has sparked more speculation about how it will all turn out than any program since Lost. There are now so may recaps and conversations going on about the program on Reddit and other forums that this week Vulture produced a recap of the recaps. From tracking down source material in 19th-century “weird fiction” to locating creepy pictures of Courir de Mardi Gras, fans and critics of the show have become detectives as obsessive as Rust Cohle, scouring screenshots of the show for the clues that will solve the crime. They were egged on to investigate from the start by Detective Marty Hart’s invocation of the detective’s curse: “Solution was right under my nose, but I was paying attention to the wrong clues.”

It is no small matter that what empowers these obsessive fan investigations is digital video technology. DVDs, DVR, and screen-capturing technology allow us to watch television shows as closely and carefully as we might a book. Lost coincided with the rise of DVR (it took until 2008 to be in 25 perecent of U.S. homes) and became one of the first shows subjected to such intense examination using digital technologies. Fans created websites dedicated to nothing but posting and decoding screen captures of the program in order to unlock its many mysteries. During the run-up to the conclusion of Breaking Bad, viewers used screen caps to discover color schemes, callbacks to earlier seasons, and hints about the finale.

But Pizzolatto and Fukunaga have made the first true cop show of the digital age, or rather, the first cop show to reckon with and exploit the effects of digitization. True Detective has provided us with so many clues that the creators are daring us to think any aspect of the show is irrelevant. Is it merely a coincidence that the show’s initial crime takes place in 1995, the very year that the DVD was invented, and that Cohle and Martin missed their target then?

Fans of Murder She Wrote, Matlock, and even Law & Order typically got to revisit an episode only when it re-aired. There was no going back to re-investigate clues or confirm that the plot had played fairly with the audience.

Neither was there much need. As a good friend pointed out to me, those 48-minute shows could not accommodate the accretion of details and clues that True Detective can maintain over eight episodes. Playing out over a short, stand-alone season and written entirely by Pizzolatto before filming, True Detective can promise viewers a tighter narrative than any show written over many years in a writer’s room. But the show also challenges the audience’s memory in ways that older detective shows couldn’t. Pizzolato has claimed that “if someone watches the first episode and really listens, it tells you 85 percent of the story of the first six episodes.” But who can really listen and watch that well?

And so to the replay we go. Few shots have been examined as much the five horsemen in episode two.

In this shot, taken from the perspective of Cohle, the camera lingers just long enough on this photograph displayed at the house of Dora Lange’s mother so that no viewer could doubt that it mattered. Even more important than the length of the shot was what it contained: a gathering of Klansmen. Or so just about everyone concluded in the recaps of episode two. Men on horses wearing pointy hats in the Deep South. What else could they be?

The conclusion was reinforced when we met Reggie Ledoux in episode five, covered as he was with white-power tattoos. Finally, as many have noted, the significance of the five figures was alluded to in other episodes.

But this past Sunday we found out that those were not Klansmen at all, but men dressed up for Courir de Mardi Gras. Not everyone was hoodwinked. The earliest correct I.D. of the scene I have located appeared on Reddit the same night episode two aired, made by a commenter who goes by HerrKroete but who might want to change his username to TrueDetective. HerrKroete is, in fact, Nicholas K. Johnson, a graduate student at Indiana University and a New Orleans native. He told me he recognized the outfits for what they were immediately.

The rest of us fell victim to the detective’s curse, helped along perhaps by a chauvinism against the South that both assumes the Klan always lies in wait and is ignorant of the actual, unique culture of Louisiana. Guilty as charged in my case. As Johnson also pointed out to me, if we’d simply watched Treme we would have know from the start. The show did an episode on Courir de Mardi Gras in season two.

What matters to me, however, is that both the identification and misidentification of the horsemen depends on digital television and the power to re-watch, rewind, and freeze the frame in such a way that the image remains legible enough to inspect, as we would a photograph. Twenty years ago, if Ben Matlock had discovered a picture like that, the camera would have lingered on it for much longer than the slightly less than two seconds it gets on True Detective, and it would have been the clue that solved the case rather than one in a constellation. Not so for Pizzolatto and Fukunaga, who anticipated Reddit and the recappers. The five horsemen shot feels like both a challenge and a dedication to them: “This one goes out to the freeze-framers.”

As the cop show undergoes this transformation driven by technology, dropping a clue into a single frame might be counted as fair play for the audience. But won’t that turn viewers into paranoid detectives, finding meaning everywhere and in everything, watching one frame at a time, but missing what really matters?

In a novel, the novelist literally creates every word of a book; live-action film and television, however, are images composed of objects that have been determined and manipulated by dozens of crew members and actors. While brilliant directors like Fukunaga clearly spend a great deal of time composing every shot, accidental juxtapositions are inevitable and open to the most ludicrous interpretations. No director was more careful about composition than Stanley Kubrick, but that did little to stop a whole school of insane interpretations from springing up around The Shining.

The intention of True Detective is surely to bring us to the same conclusion about the endlessness, if not futility, of the search for a solution. It wants us to get stuck in the same circle that its detectives are caught in, if only so we recognize the basic duplicity of cop shows, which suggest that the darkest corridors of humanity can be illuminated and disinfected in the space of an episode.